John CS Keston is an award winning transdisciplinary artist reimagining how music, video art, and computer science intersect. His work both questions and embraces his backgrounds in music technology, software development, and improvisation leading him toward unconventional compositions that convey a spirit of discovery and exploration through the use of graphic scores, chance and generative techniques, analog and digital synthesis, experimental sound design, signal processing, and acoustic piano. Performers are empowered to use their phonomnesis, or sonic imaginations, while contributing to his collaborative work. Originally from the United Kingdom, John currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he is a professor of Digital Media Arts at the University of St Thomas. He founded the sound design resource, AudioCookbook.org, where you will find articles and documentation about his projects and research.
John has spoken, performed, or exhibited original work at New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2022), the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2022), the International Digital Media Arts Conference (iDMAa 2022), International Sound in Science Technology and the Arts (ISSTA 2017-2019), Northern Spark (2011-2017), the Weisman Art Museum, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Walker Art Center, the Minnesota Institute of Art, the Eyeo Festival, INST-INT, Echofluxx (Prague), and Moogfest. He produced and performed in the piece Instant Cinema: Teleportation Platform X, a featured project at Northern Spark 2013. He composed and performed the music for In Habit: Life in Patterns (2012) and Words to Dead Lips (2011) in collaboration with the dance company Aniccha Arts. In 2017 he was commissioned by the Walker Art Center to compose music for former Merce Cunningham dancers during the Common Time performance series. His music appears in The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012) and he composed the music for the short Familiar Pavement (2015). He has appeared on more than a dozen albums including two solo albums on UnearthedMusic.com.
I literally dusted off my Maxi-Korg today which had been stored in a closet for well too long. To my surprise after a minimal amount of wiping and moving the controls it still sounded as clean as the last time I used it. This synth really sucks you in. After spending a couple of hours creating sounds I decided to experiment with the repeat function.
The repeat function has two sliders; one for speed and the other for the duration or width of the note repeating. It also has a mode switch. I set the mode to “A” to retrigger the note I was playing, then fussed with the speed and width to get this wet, growling, engine like noise. For the time being, I’m leaving this beast in my studio so expect to hear more from the Maxi-Korg in the future.
Recently I was invited by Michel Rouzic to try his software, Photosounder, designed for converting images into sound. Image to sound conversion is something I’ve been meaning to explore, so today I finally had some time to have a look. The software does much more than create strange sound from images. It’s a great time stretching tool, and it also reads in wave files as images allowing you to use the same sort of manipulation you can do on image based files.
This sound was created from the full resolution version of the graffiti photo shown. I settled on this image because of it’s simplicity, and the diagonal strokes of the tag produced a nice cascade of descending pitches. The way the flash lights up the center of the photo gave the sound a dynamic swell that I emphasized by adjusting the gamma parameter. Photosounder allows you to set the time and frequency range of the audio produced, so for this example I put the bottom at 52Hz and the top at 12kHz.
Here’s another segment from the live recording I wrote about in the last entry. This is an excerpt from the piece Some Kind of Adhesive from One Day to Save All Life (2008, Unearthed Music). If you are familiar with the piece you will probably notice that this excerpt bares little resemblance to the original recording.
This is an example of how far a piece can stray from it’s original structure. The tempo hasn’t changed and some of the same instrument recordings are used, but these elements have been shaped into something new by cutting, stretching, looping, processing, and other forms of manipulation in real-time during the performance. This makes every set different from the next and keeps things interesting for us and (hopefully) our listeners.
This is one of several little magic moments from a recent performance with Nils Westdal. You can hear the Memory Man feedback come in at about twenty five seconds. Since we were limited to using laptops for this performance I was able to include the Memory Man as an external device as described in More Memory Man Madness. One of the good things about laptop sets are that you’re able to focus on improvising arrangements of the material, and freely experiment with processing.
I made a recording of this piercing high powered hand dryer in the bathroom at a local pub. My friend Joe helped by going through the hand drying motions as I held the PCM-D50 recorder to capture this beautifully obnoxious high frequency noise.
I literally dusted off my Maxi-Korg today which had been stored in a closet for well too long. To my surprise after a minimal amount of wiping and moving the controls it still sounded as clean as the last time I used it. This synth really sucks you in. After spending a couple of hours creating sounds I decided to experiment with the repeat function. 
Recently I was invited by Michel Rouzic to try his software, 
Here’s another segment from the live recording I wrote about in the 
This is one of several little magic moments from a recent performance with Nils Westdal. You can hear the Memory Man feedback come in at about twenty five seconds. Since we were limited to using laptops for this performance I was able to include the Memory Man as an external device as described in 
I made a recording of this piercing high powered hand dryer in the bathroom at a local pub. My friend Joe helped by going through the hand drying motions as I held the PCM-D50 recorder to capture this beautifully obnoxious high frequency noise.